Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
committed to self-sufficiency, we ate bread too, even though we had chestnuts to last us for
eternity. Chestnuts (like salmon, which I have also had the questionable privilege of eating
every day for six weeks) have too dominant a taste to be a satisfactory staple. Wheat and
rice are bland, and go with anything.
But (as Jannaway remarked) that is not necessarily the point. The vegan mission is not to
supplant wheat and potatoes, but to find a substitute for meat. If people in Britain ate less
meat, or no meat at all, it is likely that they would welcome more nuts in their diet. Since
meat production from grass is not very efficient, it is reasonable to suppose that growing
nuts could be a more productive way of using pasture land than running sheep on it.
If the yields that Martin Crawford has obtained from his best nut trees can be replicated
on average quality pasture land through a substantial area of southern England beyond the
maritime palm tree belt, there will certainly be a good case for converting some grassland
over to more efficient nut production. There will also be a case, in an organic system at
least, for replacing animal feed grains grown on arable land with nut production for dir-
ect human consumption. But such a success story wouldn't seriously alter the balance of
evidence in a debate about the relative merits of grass and trees. It wouldn't suggest that
trees are inherently more productive than the grasses, because a hectare of organic wheat
still produces more calories than a hectare of walnuts, and over twice as much protein. It
would confirm the fact that farmed plants can produce more than uncultivated grass fed to
animals, but that we know already.
What the spread of viable nut production into the UK might more convincingly indicate
is the gradual advance of Mediterranean levels of biodiversity into our North Atlantic is-
land - possibly because our climate is getting warmer, but hopefully because breeders have
extended the range of cultivars. Whitefield, in a short passage in
The Living Landscape,
makes this observation:
By the time agriculture arrived in north-west Europe the cereals [originating from
the Middle East] had been improved by plant breeding and the methods of cereal farm-
ing were well developed. It was an efficient and well known package. No one went to
the trouble to invent a northern form of agriculture using the indigenous edible plants.
If they had the landscape might look very different now, perhaps more like native
woodland and less like an imitation of the south-west Asian steppe. Animal farming
was part of the same package, and here too exotics reigned. It wasn't the native roe
and red deer but the imported cattle, sheep and goats which made up the herds.
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We were colonized, and had we not been, we might have developed commercially viable
varieties of … well the two indigenous plants that Whitefield mentions are 'hazelnuts and
the starchy tubers of bulrushes'. It's interesting that the indigenous hazelnuts in Craw-
ford's trial are not significantly less productive than his walnuts which originated in Eastern
